Commercial Property Storm Water

I’m reaching out to ask if any Hoa communities have adjacent commercial properties connected to their stormwater system.
We recently discovered that the 2 commercial properties next to our community entrance have stormwater stubs that tie into our street drainage system. This was just discovered when we saw new building plans for one of the properties.
We've done a little research & found that the 21-year-old Storm Water agreement was recorded when the developer owned all of the properties.
Our community is over 20 years old with 79 single-family homes. The county maintains our streets & the 10-foot utility easements, however, we pay for servicing/maintaining our 4 stormwater retention ponds.

We have some reserve funds set aside but have not had a reserve study done yet.
Thank you for any or all comments.

Basically your developer sold the right for your adjoining businesses to tie into your retention ponds and you are stuck.

We have exactly the same situation. When our community was developed, the original developer built one side of the parkway as homes. The other side of the private parkway has three condo developments. There was supposed to be a fourth condo development, but the developer was going bankrupt, so he sold that parcel off to build an apartment complex. The last parcel on that side of the road was a small shopping center and individual parcels for commercial development.

The apartments are part of our stormwater council and they part monthly fees to us. That money is put away for reserves and is used for repairs to the fountains in the lakes. Their portion is based on the number of total doors (our condos and homes plus apartments) and they pay their percentage.

However, the developer never included the commercial parcels or the shopping center in the stormwater council. They are attached to our stormwater system, but they pay nothing toward the reserves or the maintenance. The only thing the developer did right was that he filed a commercial property owner's association documents with the county. Those do have restrictions on what type of business can be built on the commercial parcels. They own one road that connects to our parkway and they are supposed to take care of that.

Most of the parcels are doctor's offices, banks and some offices. A couple of years ago a sign went up on one of the empty parcels saying they were building a car wash there. We were concerned about run off overloading our storm water system. The property owner's association documents prohibit car washes, so we were able to contact the realtor and they cancelled the deal.

Long story (as usual from me) is that the builder gave away "free" stormwater access to the commercial properties and the owners and apartment complex are the only ones responsible for the upkeep of the stormwater system.

We have been reviewing all of the recorded documents related to these properties to possibly find a way out of this mess - the plans were just approved by the County last week so we have challenged the County to provide their calculations of the stormwater run-offs from the commercial property. We feel we are near capacity due to the single out-flow pipe in the 4th pond and we have had flooded roads in the past after 3-4 inches of rain.
I will share the exact wording once we locate it.

We have a similar situation. We actually have two easement agreements - one deals with storm water and a detention pond, the other deals with road access. We actually do benefit from the first (we don't get flooded out when we get a lot of rain). I firmly deny that we receive any benefit from the second beyond what's available to any random person who drives in this area. In exchange for these things we're stuck with 100% of the maintenance costs of the areas subject to the easements. Far too few of my neighbors are upset about this, IMHO.

I agree with others that there is little an HOA can do once the legal agreements are in place.

Slightly off-topic but related: a year or two ago we had a long discussion about things that prospective home buyers should look for if they're considering an HOA or condo community. Agreements of this nature almost never come up, and they should. A developer often signs such agreements in order to "grease the wheels", so to speak, and entice owners of adjacent properties to cooperate with the developer's plans for the site. These agreements are recorded with the county, which counts as legal disclosure, but they generally aren't disclosed to buyers outside of that. "Hey, we threw you guys under the bus" is not the sort of thing that promotes home sales, but it's a fair description of what can happen.

It's aggravating as heck, but I don't see any solution except educating buyers to avoid communities with unfair agreements in place. Yeah, like that's gonna happen ...